Reading the universe with heart and practicing science as religious ethics: reconciling islam and science in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

The article examines how the epistemologies of Islam and modern science are reconciled in the writings of the contemporary Turkish Sunni Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen (b. 1938), one of the once most influential yet vastly controversial religious leaders in contemporary Turkey. Through a close reading of his texts on science, the article analyzes how Gulen defines the scientific practice as an ethical act of reading the universe with heart and mind, and as a path in which one can fully grasp the magnificence of God. Framing with references to Sufism, Gulen also explains science as a domain where Islamic ethics can be practiced. The article shows that Gulen's project of Islamization of science is not limited to the domain of knowledge, but rather comprises a comprehensive cultural transformation led by a new epistemic approach to contest the secular hegemony in the country. Therefore, Gulen's politics of Islam at large should be understood as a project of transforming the episteme, or the hegemonic regime of knowledge, in society, from secular to Islamic. However, the article also notes, somehow paradoxically, in his harmonization of the Sufi notions with secular science, Gulen cannot escape from being captured by the very epistemology of the modern science.